Office Update: Coastal Jetty Injection

Once I began jamming on the shaggy bear rug, I felt pretty good about locking down on a color for the wooden filing cabinets that I brought home a few weeks ago (for $10). The cabinets and rug are going to live in close proximity in the office, and there’s already a bit of color going on in there (gold, pink, silver, natural woods, shades of white, and color-abundant prints), and I’m reaching a point where instead off adding more, I’m pulling back a little to make sure all of the colors work and play off each other nicely. Coastal Jetty from Valspar, and the gray fabric were a perfect match.

As matching elements, Jetty and the bear might just be the best of friends.

I’ve already primed the cabinets, so I was ready to dive in and apply a few coats of my favorite high gloss enamel (it’s much more durable on furniture than interior paint, as I found when I was painting this IKEA shelf pinkity-pink-pink). The quart (of which I only needed 1/3 of for this project) was priced just under $16, which is more than a quart of interior, but well worth it. The enamel isn’t exactly meant to be tinted using the same formulas in the wall paint samples, and the store can’t guarantee that it’ll be an exact match, but they’ve done very well both times I’ve asked them to try.

Smooth and glossy application. I used a fresh 6″ high density foam roller intended for use on doors and cabinets (helps to avoid brush strokes), and touched up in some of the creases and edges with a foam craft brush. I was immediately holding my breath that it would dry more gray and less sea foam green:

Fortunately, all was good, and yes, while it does have nice light green undertones, the finished coat is still the jetty gray I hoped for. One coat of enamel directly on the primer actually did pretty well, but I touched up a few of the larger flat surfaces with a second coat for good measure. Pretty + shiny, this picture does the glossiness justice better than the others I had taken.

Feels good having taken the office from this:

To this:

To this:

With the paint in place, I bet you hardly noticed that the pair of filing cabinets aren’t identical to one another. That’s something I’m pleased with. I’m eager to have the soon-to-be-finished bear rug in there to anchor the Jetty. Pretty and functional office FTW.